Beatrix Campbellhttp://www.newstatesman.com/writers/beatrix_campbell
enhttp://www.newstatesman.com/cultural-capital/2013/01/wigan-pier-and-beyond-so-who-orwell
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>
Written on the cusp of 1984, the feminist writer Beatrix Campbell argues that we needn't fear for Orwell's "common decency".</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/articles_2013/103092399.jpg?itok=uDEQhM1r" width="510" height="348" alt="A woman walking her dog at Wigan Pier " title="Wigan Pier" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">A rainy day at Wigan Pier. Photo: Getty Images.</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
It's an odd thought that Britain's best-selling modern writer and, according to recent polls, the most highly esteemed, was a socialist who was best known for his anti-socialism. Though a friend of mine has pointed out that George Orwell is a best-seller because his books are set texts for thousands of children, nonetheless <em>1984</em> is Orwell's year and we are going to see some unseemly body snatching, with the Right and Left both claiming his satires as prophecies, and as prophecies belonging to them. It tells us something about the state of England.</p>
<p>
On the side of the Right are Orwell's anti-Sovietism, his conservative anti-modernism and his celebration of English common sense. The Left also has its anti-Sovietism, but, more importantly, Orwell articulates Left paranoia about the use of power and about popular discontent with the State. For still few on the Left can conceive of a socialism which isn't about State power and thus Orwell utters a scepticism about the popularity of socialism which the Left itself cannot own to. In this second term of Thatcherism, of populism grounded in the common sense of decency, domesticity and anti-democracy, Orwell has gained a new meaning.</p>
<p>
We will be seeing young men from the generation of 1968 who marched against the invasion of Cambodia and against the internment of Republicans in Northern Ireland saying “we must claim patriotism for the Left”, as Orwell did. We'll be hearing veteran libertarians repeating calls for a new morality and taking seriously, as does his biographer Bernard Crick, his notions of “common decency”.</p>
<p>
What then does Orwell's present-day “meaning” tell us about the state of England? He is popular because he is conservative, because he is a pessimist who doesn't much like women and who knows little about the working class. That fits with the spirit of our times. If there is anything the Right and the Left share it is a pessimism about the people and their political proclivities.</p>
<p>
Perhaps Orwell is also popular because you don't have to have read him to know what he is on about. I've just spent a year or so living with <em>The Road to Wigan Pier</em>. I couldn't remember having read it when Virago publishers suggested that I make the return journey up the road. But I thought I must have. Throughout the journey I would ask if people had read <em>Wigan Pier</em> and most who said “yes” also said “but I can't remember when — it must have been at school”. (Only a few remembered what it said and most of them had the original Left Rook Club edition on their shelves. Typically they remembered the first half of the book, the documentary account of his travel through the unemployed North, and ignored the second half — a rash rant about socialism. I imagine many of his re-visitors are going to enjoy the second half and forget the first.</p>
<p>
When I did get round to reading Orwell — and today you can't admit to not having read his work — it was a disturbing experience. That is mainly because he wasn't talking to me, the daughter of working-class parents in the North, though a journalist now; or to people like me. Although much of his work is about “the masses”, we, the masses, are the <em>objects</em> in his narrative. He is the subject. That's the case in <em>Wigan Pier</em> and again in <em>1984</em>. Some of the best material in <em>Wigan Pier</em> is his personal-political stream of consciousness about being an upper-class gent finding himself on the same side as the lower orders. It is a good record of his outrage, not of what life felt like for the working-class people he appears to describe.</p>
<p>
Yet part of Orwell's outrage is that he sees the working class as a class without a voice, without an idea, without resources. It's a class without consciousness; it's a degenerate class.</p>
<p>
There might seem little in this view of the working class that a compassionate, upper-class Tory would not share; and indeed both Right and Left do share the myth, most clearly articulated in Orwell's critique of modern socialism, of the working class as both corrupt and unconscious. Raymond Williams, in his unsurpassed little book <em>Orwell</em>, traces the depiction of the working class in <em>Animal</em> <em>Farm</em> and <em>1984</em> as “powerful but stupid” and an “apathetic mass”, people who “have never learned to think”. Those expressions come from the pens of Orwell's apostles and from the mouth of every pious activist complaining that people don't come to meetings these days because they are too busy watching videos; that, unlike the middle class, they are corrupted by consumer goods.</p>
<p>
Orwell's understanding of power — the actual theme of most of his works — depends on his view of the masses. And in <em>1984</em> our first meeting with the “proles” demonstrates his view. Three men are standing reading a newspaper, two others are studying it over their shoulders. “Winston could see absorption in every line of their bodies. It was obviously some serious bit of news they were reading.” But what was it? The lottery! The proles are a rabble of <em>Daily</em> <em>Star</em> readers and Rangers supporters (all men, of course).</p>
<p>
If these men are socialist at all, their vision is merely of a “society with the worst abuses left out”. Orwell warns us in <em>Wigan</em> <em>Pier</em> that socialism can't be reduced to economic justice and reform, but he never “imagines” what a non-reductionist socialism would look like. He has a problem there because the interest groups which have challenged modern economic reductionism are precisely those for whom Orwell reserves his vintage vitriol: “that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit juice drinkers”.</p>
<p>
So who is Orwell for, in this jamboree year, when both Right and Left will be slugging it out to claim him for themselves as if, like the Bible or <em>Capital</em> his books were necessary to their litany? I can see why he has been recruited for the Right. But what is the Left doing trying to reclaim his “common sense”, his elevation of moral clichés which make up our common sense? Today's commonsense politics, which Orwell appears to represent so neatly, are the consensus politics that reproduce passivity and dependence in the working class. They are not about <em>producing</em> politics — as ideas or action — but about <em>managing</em> politics.</p>
<p>
In the end Orwell abandons socialist politics for a kind of southern suburban consensus in which many of his characters face a hopeless future because the only political processes that Orwell can imagine (outside war) can neither touch the exercise of power nor can they change “consensus man” himself. This politics about what is good and valuable in life depends on nostalgia, in which the past is always better than the future. It is thus a politics of pessimism. Orwell's writing in fact, as Williams shows, creates “the conditions for defeat and despair”.</p>
<p>
It is odd that Orwell should see so little about how people can change, since he himself was transformed by his own contact with the oppressed. Yet there remains a gap between his feeling for the people and his thought about political action by the people. This is all the more ironic since in <em>Wigan</em> <em>Pier</em> and, later, in <em>The Lion and the Unicorn</em>, Orwell is prescient enough to put “everyday life” on to the political agenda and to demand a cultural revolution. He does not see how, if changing everyday life and pursuing a cultural revolution do become prime political objectives, this in itself will expand the parameters of politics in ways that will necessarily disturb the eternal verities of his common sense.</p>
<p>
For what, in his common sense, would Orwell have made of the Greenham Common women, the kind he loved to hate, who have maintained a majority against nuclear missiles despite the state machine, the blunders of the Labour Party at the last election and the “normal” lapse into apathy of the masses? It took all those bearded and bright ecologists to alert the nation to the pollution of the planet — when Orwell just thought, like much of the macho Left, that such types were naive and silly.</p>
<p>
As for women generally, Orwell either sees them as disturbing sexual magnets with whom pleasure promises peace but produces punishment; or they are crazy, woolly, ugly old crackpots whose radicalism takes them to the edge of society. He must, of course, reject feminism for in his time too it offered a critique of all those “decent” suburban values he holds dear. Feminism is Orwell's Achilles' heel, and he pays dearly for it. For he is left without those ingredients which do transform limited economic objectives into radical aspirations precisely for the reasons that he has rejected them (they are nakedly emotional and vulgarly unsophisticated). What Orwell offers instead is a radical re-possession of key words in consensus politics — patriotism, decency and justice.</p>
<p>
In Orwell’s future, there is no opposition that succeeds, there is only surrender. After all, Winston Smith embraces his own defeat. His “completion” as a character comes with his embrace of Big Brother. His self-hatred has no resolution in the present, nor in politics or in protest; it only finds peace in the past. Throughout his work, Orwell mobilises nostalgia for an Edwardian England when a pint was a full pint and vehicles went on four legs and domestic life was decent. It's a forgetful kind of memory which is constantly recruited to serve conservatism. Childhood memories are falsified memories which bury the pain of the past, but they make up so much of the substance of Orwell's critique, his bad temper about the present and his panic about the future.</p>
<p>
In <em>1984</em> and in <em>Wigan</em> <em>Pier</em>, Orwell's polemic is less about history than about accommodating flight from modern life. We find it again in <em>Coming Up for Air</em>. It's a commonplace and popular theme in English culture: Englishness is the rustic village where every season is summer, everybody's mum makes jam, everybody's dad does the pools and neighbours look after the old folks.</p>
<p>
Typically, both Right and Left are susceptible to this myth. The Right draws on Victorian truths and the Left on a do-it-yourself ideology of community and craft. Not surprisingly, Orwell's commonsense Englishness finds force with both. But the trouble I have with these traditions is that they are conservative and that they lie about the condition of most people then — an exhausted, insanitary and subordinate condition — by turning it into a romantic myth.</p>
<p>
What's in that way of life for a woman like me? What was ever in it for working-class women? Come to think of it, there wasn't much to it for working-class men either. Modern life may feature all those things Orwell doesn't like — electronics, state surveillance, mass media, birth control. But it is also about greater mass participation in politics than ever before. Women of my age and class — mid '30s — have skills to sell, sexual pleasure to seek and satisfy and a vote. As like as not we have a trade union card as well, children, our own name on the rent book. We haven't had that before, not all at the same time.</p>
<p>
That's a function of politics of course. It's also an expression of a new form of resolution of the historic settlement between men and women. It is less and less at women's expense while more and more it demands not only the transformation of the female condition but of the masculine way of life too.</p>
<p>
Just as Orwell's future ascribes an un-changed role to the sexes, so it is for the different classes. He imagines a prole class forever sad and subordinate, doomed to drink and gambling, gossip and superstition. The working class is, of course, in the image of its men, its apparently degenerate sex. In Orwell, the future is always worse, and always brings the consummation of coercive power. And his new vocabulary of absolute state power is his great contribution to the torture. There is in Orwell's projection no future for democracy, for all his artful celebrations of our democratic way of life. In foreseeing the future of power he only saw negative force, not power mediated or modified by a countervailing popular force. In foreseeing the future, he didn't see us.</p>
<p>
16 December 1983</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 25 Jan 2013 12:34:48 +0000Beatrix Campbell192307 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/life-and-society/2008/03/rape-police-women-law-silence
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>It&#039;s not the law on rape, it&#039;s the culture from the police canteens, to the courts, juries, the pubs</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Senior Met police officer <a href="http://www.met.police.uk/about/yates.htm">John Yates</a> has spoken with unprecedented candour about the failure of policing to match the cultural revolution among women, more of whom, with every year that passes, alert the police to rape.</p>
<p>At the beginning of March he repeated in a Guardian interview what he has often said to his colleagues: that detectives don’t bring the same professionalism to rape as they do to other crimes; when a woman reports rape and ‘the body language is sceptical, the voice is sceptical, what is that saying to you?’</p>
<p>The Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner is also the spokesperson on rape for the association of Chief Police Officers. He is a senior officer mandated with reforming the policing of rape, the top man. His collective mea culpa makes him unprecedented in policing – never has a top cop so confidently taken the side of women and so assertively challenged his own professional culture for its failure to do its job.</p>
<p>That makes John Yates interesting. It is unusual for a senior police officer to be both self-critical and openly encouraging the government to participate in a change in our collective consciousness. He deserves better from the political system. The law on rape is not the presenting problem. The culture – from the police canteens, to the courts, to the juries, to the pubs and kitchens of the land – is the problem.</p>
<p>The Sexual Offences Act was well revised by the government, working with experts drawn from the survivors movements, the Rape Crisis centres (themselves in crisis), and emboldened by a coterie of women in the House of Commons who have been the guardians of reform. In the House of Commons there is an unusual consensus among the parties – Yates’ comments attracted a serious response from the Conservative MP Caroline Spelman. The Conservatives have in the last year made bold attempts to connect with the crisis in the prosecution of sexual crime, and with its victims.</p>
<p>Fear of men has long been an element of Tory appeal to women. It was the foundation of the Tories’ law and order discourse – particularly in the 1950s and 1960s when it animated Tory women’s resistance to the Conservative leaders’ reform of the criminal justice system. In the context of contemporary feminism the Tories lost confidence, they recoiled from the implications of a more comprehensive critique of patriarchal power. But David Cameron has released a new mood among Tory women – in the certain knowledge that his party cannot afford to squander the women’s vote.</p>
<p>But there is an eerie silence among ministers who usually feel unrestrained in lecturing the people about morals, law, standards. They have not lacked opportunities – Yates’ contribution this month; the evidence gathered by ACPO, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, the Homes Office, and the Metropolitan Police Service’s own research into its handling of cases: all of this has yielded the devastating case that – as Yates acknowledges – the problem of rape investigations is the investigators.</p>
<p>Why hasn’t the prime minister or the secretary of state for Justice thought it worth commenting publicly on the shattering discoveries of the Met’s research into its own cases of reported rape. It is dynamite: the Met’s researchers discovered a pattern: that that men who like raping women target the very groups least likely to be taken seriously by the police; and among those cases the police didn’t bother to investigate, a significant minority concerned suspects who already had a police record of violence and sex offences.</p>
<p>What explains the lack of public response, the lack of engagement with the electorate, the reluctance to generate a great debate?</p>
<p>There have been other opportunities: the Manchester United players’ party, to which they invited 100 women, and excluded their own partners – an event that produced a reported rape. This government is full of football fans. Why didn’t they seize the time to critique the sexism of the most celebrated team in the country?</p>
<p>Labour seized control of the law and order agenda from the Tories, it has restlessly introduced more law and order legislation than any other, it anxiously monitors focus groups and their populist concerns about crime pubic order, immigration. But is shown no interest in this catastrophe of criminal justice; it has not taken the side of women.</p>
<p>Is it that despite a strong – probably the strongest – feminist presence in the House of Commons, the government just doesn’t notice them, it isn’t much interested in them or in the intelligence they bring to notions of crime and justice? And it just doesn’t know why this issue is important – not just for the victims who have no hope of securing justice, but for public security and for a culture that is inherently compromised by the abuse of women.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:55:11 +0000Beatrix Campbell159853 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/life-and-society/2007/11/miss-world-knowing-kitsch
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The Miss World pageant isn&#039;t all kitsch and fun, it is a knowing and conservative intervention in se</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Beauty with a purpose: the mantra of the Miss World competition – its excuse for putting sexism on parade. The winning woman, you see, gets to go on a world tour raising money for charity. So, the competition is not, therefore, about objectifying women, it's not a cattle market, it is about lifting a lovely lady from obscurity to spend a year touring the world being seen and raising funds for good causes. </p>
<p>But the defenders of the Miss World competition aren’t particularly interested in the ‘beauty with a purpose’ cover, their stake in the argument isn’t much interested in the aspiring Miss Worlds either. This is a pageant of purposeful vacuity - its silliness and its ‘Sunday Palladium’ kitsch are all part of its armour. It’s a game to tax the fortitude of the eternally entertaining Terry Wogan or Bruce Forsyth. </p>
<p>No, the defenders’ interest is in another agenda: it’s right on to be right off. It relies on the notion that Miss World isn’t an issue because the critique of it is no longer an issue: feminism is a thing of the past, ergo sexism is a thing of the past. </p>
<p>The great feminist theorist of popular culture and advertising, Judith Williamson, reminds us that kitsch is a weapon in the propaganda value of retro-sexism, it flourishes in a frame of period style, and the style implies that it is a knowing design: this is sexism with an alibi. It throws the pageant into an another era – before feminism came along and spoiled the fun. Kitsch is the key to its transcendence – it slithers between eras, between pre and post-feminism. It invites the thought that feminism never happened.</p>
<p>It is a knowing escape from the enlightenment, from that moment when smutty Bob Hope, a maestro of old men’s double entendre and a regular host of the show, was on the stage at the Royal Albert Hall and a posse from the Women’s Liberation Movement assailed him with flour bombs and tomatoes. </p>
<p>It has been bothered by controversy ever since – it finally left British television screens at the end of the decade, and departed these shores, too, holing up wherever it reckoned it would be free of hassle. It has rarely been free of hassle however, and it shiftily moves across continents and frontiers to wherever it is hoped the collective consciousness isn’t yet on the side of women. It is Miss World’s bad luck to find itself in a world where feminism is (despite the demise of its organisational form) is an unfinished revolution and religious fundamentalism is a global counter-revolution.</p>
<p>Wherever it wanders, Miss World is always in an argument and it has to steer a course between the sway of politics. Its history before the Women’s Liberation protest is instructive – its founder Eric Morley, the boss of the entertainment empire Mecca, first fielded women wearing bikinis at the end of the 1950s: those were the days when the beauty business functioned rather like boxing – a way out and up for those whose class and gender didn’t offer many alternatives. </p>
<p>But it was also in a sense sexually ‘explicit’, it was intended to deliver as much flesh and titillation as British television would tolerate. This was as near as British television could get to the centrefold girl - that was, and is, the point of Miss World. And that is why Miss World deserves our protest: the competition is a knowing and conservative intervention in sexual politics, it has never been innocent.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 30 Nov 2007 13:19:39 +0000Beatrix Campbell158897 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/society/2007/07/housing-executive-ireland
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Observations on Northern Ireland</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Everybody knows the Seven Towers - they're on the horizon as you leave Belfast city centre on your way heading north, the most dangerous quarter of Northern Ireland during the armed conflict.</p>
<p>These tower blocks were thrown up during the 1960s and regarded as fortresses of nationalism. The blocks' problem was less the politics of their tenants than their inability to withstand the normal wear and tear of habitation.</p>
<p>Now they have handsome new foyers with concierges. But still they drive people crazy. Pigeons nest in the cladding, their droppings carpeting the landings, and raw sewage spews into baths and sinks.</p>
<p>The residents, together with the Public Participation and Rights project, organised a hearing last month on the state of their homes and provided video interviews for an audience of experts. A woman asked how she feels living in the blocks looks astonished by the question. "Are you serious?" she replies, before her hand covers her face and she bursts into tears.</p>
<p>Her children are among the 63 still living in the blocks - though the Northern Ireland Housing Executive agrees there shouldn't be any. These residents want out, though they don't want to leave the community. But there is a problem: they are Catholics.</p>
<p>Hard to believe, but true - almost a decade after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, and three decades after the civil rights movement mobilised against the kind of institutionalised sectarianism that deprived some of access to public housing.</p>
<p>The Housing Executive was set up 30 years ago to address the crisis and is proud of its record. But questions using the Freedom of Information Act have harvested evidence that the Housing Executive is transgressing legal duties bequeathed by the Good Friday Agreement to promote equality, its own duty to reduce or remove the housing differential and the duty to respond to "objective need" inscribed in the St Andrews Agreement, the prelude to the restoration of devolved government.</p>
<p>The figures speak for themselves: 60 per cent of housing applicants are Catholic and 40 per cent Protestant. But 60 per cent of allocations are Protestant and only 40 per cent Catholic. In north Belfast the waiting list is 83 per cent Catholic.</p>
<p>The law requires the public authorities to target objective social need, irrespective of religion, and to test the impact of all policy-making in respect of named interests - including religion and political affiliation. But residents feel that they are told, not consulted, about housing strategy.</p>
<p>The 2000-2007 Housing Executive strategy, "Tackling Housing Need", set aside a £15m special fund to acquire land to meet urgent need - Catholic need.</p>
<p>However, it has spent only £5.3m. The executive also has the power to "vest" or assign land for development. But in its strategy document the authority laments that it can do nothing about segregation: "Surplus lands in one community are not readily available for use by another."</p>
<p>There is a seriously declining Protestant population and a stable Catholic presence. The Housing Executive's comment applies, therefore, to surplus land in Protestant communities.</p>
<p>Social researcher Eoin Rooney reminds us that since 2000 loyalists have drawn an Orange Line around territory deemed Protestant. His report, <em>Waiting for Equality</em>, reveals that the Housing Executive plan to build 2,300 new homes between 2000 and 2007, mostly to meet Catholic need, has failed. More than halfway through, less than a quarter had been built and 28 per cent of those were in Protestant communities with a housing surplus and "without identifiable need for new housing".</p>
<p>He noticed that the Unionist vote, in remorseless decline in the north Belfast parliamentary constituency since the early 1980s, was suddenly staunched in 2005.</p>
<p>When it launched the housing strategy, the Housing Executive made the extraordinary announcement that since social housing is segregated, there should be no social housing near the city centre. A government-commissioned document, the Grimley Report, on regeneration of the northern quarter, published in 2006, came to the same conclusion: "Further housing development has the potential of increased polarisation" and therefore, in the name of reconciliation and community relations, none should be built on the prized city centre sites. Instead, there should be private-sector apartment blocks - exactly the kind of residence the parents living in the Seven Towers don't want.</p>
<p>Neither the Grimley Report, nor the Housing Executive strategy, have tested their policies against "objective need", nor the legal requirement to assess their impact in relation to affected groups. The executive insists it is powerless to address sectarian segregation - to do so would entail unacceptable "social engineering".</p>
<p>But to some residents, what is going on is ethnic cleansing.</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 05 Jul 2007 12:00:00 +0000Beatrix Campbell157274 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/society/2007/04/rape-police-women-victims
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Observations on criminal justice - the shocking failure when it comes to rape prosecutions</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Shocking evidence is circling the desks of the police and the Home Office showing that many men reported to the police for rape are not investigated, and their crimes do not appear in police records - even though they have previous records of violent offences and sexual attacks on women. Men rape with impunity and immunity, and they can do it again and again. Furthermore, as long as men target women who have been drinking or young women under 18, there is a good chance that the police won't bother to interview or investigate, and the allegations won't appear "on the books".</p>
<p>New research commissioned by the Metropolitan Police delved into the Met's own case files: it not only analysed the victims' fates in the criminal justice system, but for the first time checked out the histories of the suspects. No one had carried out an offender profile of alleged rapists before. No one had correlated the victims' stories with the records of the accused. The results are shattering.</p>
<p>Researchers reviewed the files on 677 rapes reported to the London Metropolitan Police in two months in 2005, and followed up by tracing the suspects. A third of the reported rapes were "not crimed" - that is, they were not investigated or recorded as crimes, because they were not thought to involve an offence. But many of the suspects had "previous". More than half of the men accused of raping women who had been drinking, where the cases were "not crimed", had a history of sexual offences against women.</p>
<p>A third of suspects whose victims were under 18 were not investigated, but had histories of violent offending. Among those cases that were crimed, but didn't get past the police investigation stage, were some with known histories of offending who were not prosecuted, "in the public interest".</p>
<p>This is sorely embarrassing for the macho (and besieged) Home Office. The evidence shows that the police directed their gaze at the wrong people. "We concentrated on services for victims," comments Richard Sumray, a magistrate member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, "but we did not concentrate on offender profiles."</p>
<p>One of the country's pre-eminent researchers into sexual crimes against women, Professor Liz Kelly of London Metropolitan University, says the new findings are unprecedented. "This is unadulterated data that we've never had access to before." It was Kelly's research - based on the experiences of 3,500 victims - that in 2005 exposed the alarming collapse of the conviction rate. What was not apparent earlier (because it had not been correlated) was that men who like raping women do it over and over; they target their quarry.</p>
<p>It is the not-crimed category that is particularly sinister, officers giving up on cases without even checking up on the suspect. This is evidence that officials will want to keep out of the public domain, but which also vindicates reformers in the police service. The Met's review - the largest of its kind - vindicates Kelly's celebrated study that showed an unbroken increase in the numbers of women (and a few men) reporting rape in the past 20 years but a static number of convictions.</p>
<p>"The attrition rate [the rate of cases being not-crimed, not detected, or not pursued by the victim] is abominable," comments Assistant Commissioner John Yates, who, as well as heading the Met's cash-for-peerages inquiry, is also lead spokesman on rape for the Association of Chief Police Officers. "Rape is regarded as second only to murder, because of the violence and the violation, but most attrition takes place with us in the police," he says. "My aim is to take best practice in scene management and forensics in cases like murder, and apply it to rape."</p>
<p>The crisis comes from what Kelly calls a "culture of scepticism". "The police are often quite willing to interview people who don't support an account," she says, "and they seldom follow up what supports it."</p>
<p>If the not-crimed and attrition findings weren't bad enough, the picture becomes even more disturbing when correlated with patterns of vulnerability among victims. The overwhelming majority of rape reports on the Met's files - 87 per cent - are made by women whose characteristics make them vulnerable. Most are known to the perpetrators: acquaintances, partners and ex-partners; they are young; they consume alcohol or drugs; they suffer from mental illness. These categories attract police pessimism and a preoccupation with the virtues or vulnerabilities of the victim rather than the propensities of the perpetrators. This correlation appears to be decisive.</p>
<p>Pioneering research by Vanessa Munro at King's College London transcended the ban on talking to British jury members by assembling jurors from the electoral register for mock trials. She found that although the law on consent was radically reformed by the Sexual Offences Act 2003 - requiring defendants to show that they had taken steps to ascertain consent, and requiring that the alleged victims had the capacity, choice and freedom to give consent - it still didn't help them greatly. Some jurors felt that, however intoxicated, "as long as a woman was conscious she'd have the capacity to consent or resist".</p>
<p>Sumray reckons that the crisis is multidimensional: cultural and political, as well as a policing problem. The political arena, he says, has "to begin to influence how people think about this".</p>
<p>There is good news: the promotion of specialists in the Met's dedicated Project Sapphire, and greater respect and care extended to victims by sexual assault referral centres. The Met's response to research is already palpable; it reduced the number of rape reports dismissed as false allegations from 10 per cent in 2005 to 4 per cent in 2006, in line with Kelly's estimate.</p>
<p>According to Kelly, however, given the sexism of the culture and British institutions: "Yes, a woman can get better care, but she still can't get justice."</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 16 Apr 2007 12:00:00 +0000Beatrix Campbell156291 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/sport/2007/02/racing-industry-greyhound
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>More than 25,000 greyhounds are discarded every year by the racing industry, and most of them get ki</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Cleopatra had hers. Queen Elizabeth I had hers, too. And I've got mine - Molly Kay, a shy, sleek, blue, aerodynamic wonder of the world. But the journey from the pyramids to the asylum where our eyes met and we fell in love is a lamentable narrative. It's a story of not rags to riches, but riches to rags and even unceremonious death.</p>
<p>On 16 February, David Smith, a local businessman, appears before North Dur ham magistrates facing an unprecedented prosecution: he has been killing thousands of grey hounds for years. He won't be prosecuted for that - it's not illegal - but has been summonsed in a private prosecution by the Environment Agency for illegally dumping thousands of unwanted greyhound carcasses on his allotment.</p>
<p>How did it come to this?</p>
<p>Greyhounds are reckoned to have been around in their contemporary form for about 8,000 years. Their relics appear in the tombs of phar aohs. Their prowess streaks across the vases of Mediterranean empires. The greyhound diaspora stretches from the Middle East, along conquering trails through Europe, to the royal houses of our own monarchs, from the Tudors to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.</p>
<p>These fleet sight-hunters who target rabbits and hares and squirrels have been petted as accessories to the aristocracy. They are admired for a peculiar faculty: greyhounds have been known to surpass 40 miles per hour, and yet they lie around all day, like Mae West, resting. That magnificent greyhound chest is for breathing and extreme acceleration. They dash, like springs; they soar. In <em>The Canterbury Tales</em>, Chaucer describes them as "fowels in flight". Their heads and hips are perfectly engineered for spasms of speed. They run for joy; there's even a notion that they smile, and then they spend the day prone.</p>
<p>The Normans banned the common people from owning greyhounds. Royal dynasties colonised them, and they made house room for greyhounds much as, sometimes, they admitted clever black slaves: as exceptions and adornments. In some societies, including our own, the greyhound was prized above a woman. The history of this dog is stitched into narratives of empire and class, of country and city.</p>
<p>They have been bred not for killing but for running. In less than a century, however, the greyhound has been transformed from an emblem of luxury to a victim of capitalist exploitation.</p>
<p>In the 20th century the greyhound was proletarianised; the dog became a working-class man thing - like allotments and football and pubs, an excuse to get away from their women. This happene d, however, only after the industriali sation of its spectacular prowess, with the creation of a mass spectator sport and a billion-pound betting industry.</p>
<p>This modern crisis begins there. The effort to release the greyhound from rural sport to urban stadium triumphed in the invention of a mechanical lure early in the 20th century. That allowed the greyhound to hurl itself around the oval stadiums that then proliferated in Britain, Ireland, America and Australia.</p>
<p>Britain's first was Belle Vue, built in Manchester in 1926. The industry proliferated until the 1980s, when stinky, scruffy stadiums were closing down en masse. London now has only two - Wimbledon and Walthamstow.</p>
<p>But the decline in the live audience did not lead to a decline in either the number of dogs or the betting. The betting industry offered a fresh opportunity for you to part with your money when it invented the Bookmakers' Afternoon Greyhound Service (Bags). That means afternoon racing where the dogs sprint round empty stadiums. So, although live spectatorship declined, betting flourished. But Bags needs more dogs, and that means more surplus dogs.</p>
<p>Tony Peters, founder of Greyhound Action - the direct-action wing of the greyhound welfare movement - reckons that you need only study the stud books of the British and Irish breeders (most greyhounds in Britain come from Ireland) to see the source of the problem.</p>
<p>Greyhounds are bred to race. If each track needs 400 new dogs a year to compete, behind those racers are all the siblings who don't make the grade. "Every year more than 30,000 are bred to race," says Peters. "The industry is churning out all these dogs." Even those who do triumph on the track have relatively short racing careers. Injury or exhaustion can finish off a racer by the age of four. Then they join the armies of the discarded - it is believed that between 25,000 and 30,000 greyhounds are discarded every year. Most of them get killed. "No one was tackling this problem," says Peters.</p>
<p><strong>Stop the sport altogether</strong></p>
<p>Certainly not the bookmakers' industry, which is estimated to have an annual turnover approaching £2bn. Bookies are becoming interested in virtual racing - punters, it seems, will bet on anything, even the illusion of a greyhound. That appears to be an attractive option, too, to Greyhound Action, which wants to see an end to greyhound racing altogether.</p>
<p>The bookmakers' alibi against the growing abhorrence of greyhound destruction is the historic and necessary separation between the breeders and the bookies. This, of course, masks the symbiosis between all the players: the bookies are largely the owners of the tracks, and it is the bookies who have generated the demand for the beasts.</p>
<p>The bookmakers tasted the first scent of pressure in 1991 when Norman Lamont, the then chancellor, introduced a voluntary levy of 0.4 per cent as a contribution to a greyhound fund for the industry, to be run by the British Greyhound Racing Board. The board was described by the racing commentator Jim Cre min as "a sham democracy", set up "in the hope of gaining control of government funding".</p>
<p>Many bookmakers did not contribute - including the intransigent chair of the Association of British Bookmakers, Warwick Bartlett. Unsurprisingly, little had changed by the new millennium, when the industry came under growing scrutiny from a convergence of animal welfare campaigners, corporate concern about the decline of the stadiums, and a government that was worried about the unseemly evidence of excessive gambling profits and the sordid state of the business.</p>
<p>Cremin warned of growing government disquiet while bookmakers sat "on both sides of the negotiating table" as owners of tracks and as businesses profiting from the racing.</p>
<p>The Gambling Bill concentrated the mind. The government's greyhound man in the Lords, David Lipsey, took over the board, restructured it, and brokered a deal with the promoters to increase the levy to 0.6 per cent by last year (2006). But much of that fund is invested in reinventing the industry and marketing greyhound racing as a classier night out before hitting the clubs. It has not dealt with the killing fields and the dogs bred to die.</p>
<p>Ten thousand dogs are retired from racing every year. Some are put to sleep and disposed of by local authority pounds. Some go into rescue sanctuaries, and the number that find a new home is increasing - up from 2,000 a year to about 3,500.</p>
<p>Molly Kay is a lucky one - she is living happily ever after among doting human beings. But she is in the minority: most of her generation lived a life brutish and short, only to be discarded by a corporate culture that depends on people like David Smith. His prosecution draws attention to the industry's total failure to take responsibility for the gap between surplus value and surplus to requirements.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 12 Feb 2007 12:00:00 +0000Beatrix Campbell155612 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/node/152745
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Observations on truth</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>During the BBC's daring truth and reconciliation encounters, hosted by Desmond Tutu, Sylvia Hackett kept asking the iconic loyalist killer Michael Stone about "the files" that were, it seems, her husband's death warrant in Northern Ireland.</p>
<p>Why couldn't she see them, she asked. The answer takes us to the very heart of the strength and weakness of the series <em>Facing the Truth</em>.</p>
<p>This was reality television like we never see it - human beings living with great grief, unsoothed, lending their pain to something bigger: the effort to sort this thing out. They sat together with a guardian angel, the most popular priest on the planet, Archbishop Tutu, in a beautiful room where they were joined by men who had killed their people - stoical, contemplative soldiers.</p>
<p>One family exemplified the hardship of just sitting still, holding a gaze, asking a relevant question, speaking a sentence worth saying. What on earth would that be? The father's face seemed to be pulled away from the soldier as if by a magnetic force. The mother's face was ripped in sorrow. The young son, curious, and the daughter, transfixed, stared at the paramilitary man, listening to every word he said, watching every flick of his eyebrow, every breath in his cheeks.</p>
<p>The soldiers, all of them dignified, confounded the blithe contempt that the 30-year war has delivered to these men as the people who were to blame: low life, subhuman killers. Well, here </p>
<p>they were, taking it, dangerous </p>
<p>men deciding not to be.</p>
<p>We learned something that challenged the interpretation of that war, this side of the water - of Paddies doing what they do: killing each other - and something about their non-equivalence. The republican soldiers' mission was to kill the British state that was denying their right to be human. The loyalist soldiers' mission was to kill Catholics.</p>
<p>One of the loyalists, Michael Stone, a prolific killer, insisted that his targets were on "the files" - and so they were implicated. One such was the husband of Sylvia Hackett and the brother of Roddy: Dermot Hackett. He was murdered nearly 19 years ago by Stone, whose bravado was memorialised in footage of his astounding attack on the mass funeral at Milltown Cemetery. One of his victims was Tommy McErlean, whose mother, Sally, was one of the fabled good women of West Belfast, a pied piper who organised youth clubs in Divis Flats, where there were probably "files" on everyone.</p>
<p>Sylvia Hackett wouldn't have it: her man was just a person, a Catholic. Stone insisted on "the files". They were the source of his legitimacy.</p>
<p>But "the files" took us to the limits of these encounters, to the absent presence - the state itself. British military intelligence and the Royal Ulster Constabulary created those files. Stone's safe passage to and from that cemetery was organised by the RUC. Stone couldn't give Sylvia Hackett the files. The RUC, MI5 and Downing Street won't give her the files, either. Stone's encounter with the Hacketts will not be replicated by the army officers, the Special Branch personnel, the security commanders and politicians who sanctioned Stone and the death squads.</p>
<p>Truth and reconciliation processes depend upon the sponsorship of states. They depend on states subjecting themselves to scrutiny, to opening their files, and in so doing, acknowledging their own role as contributors to the conflict, or rather, as the cause of the conflict.</p>
<p>The British state won't surrender itself to these relatives. It won't hazard the encounters that the men who killed their loved ones dared to enter. That is why there is no truth and reconciliation in Northern Ireland.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 13 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000Beatrix Campbell152745 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/node/150892
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The Black Mountain looms over Belfast, but until this month the city&#039;s people were banned from enjoy</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>The man stands at the peak of the Black Mountain and his eyes scavenge the startling Mediterranean blue of the sky above Belfast. "Where is the little bastard?" he murmurs. "Ah, there he is. Now isn't that lovely?"</p>
<p>He's spotted a skylark. The soundscape is silence and skylarks and meadow pipits and his feet on heath and heather and lush, black bog. It is the beginning of June 2005, and before the month is out the Black Mountain will be open for the first time to the people.</p>
<p>Terry Enright slowly turns 360 degrees. "I've never seen this before," he says. "It's never been so clear." What he sees is Scotland far over to the east, and the Isle of Man, and when he turns inland there is Lough Neagh - the biggest lake in these islands - five of the Six Counties and Donegal on the west coast. Down below is the bowl of Belfast. "The people of Belfast never saw this. They live here but it's not been part of their life." Enright lives here, too, on a Ballymurphy council estate nesting at the bottom of the mountain that skirts the city skyline. But he made it his mission to move around the mountain.</p>
<p>There is still a blue notice where the road meets the path to the peak, telling people to keep out of private property. Actually, it isn't private; since the 1980s the cap of the Black Mountain has belonged to the Ministry of Defence, and before that to farmers. "I was once up here on my own looking for an old ruin of a building, and jeeps skidded to a halt. The soldiers all spread out and headed towards me and asked me what I was doing. I said, 'You're not going to believe me. I'm looking for a ruin.'" When yet another squad challenged him during another dander, says Enright: "I said, 'What are <em>you</em> doing here? I fucking live here, brother.' Anyway, I gave the soldier a leaflet about the mountain, and I said: 'Here, send that to your mammy and show her where you are.'"</p>
<p>Where he was happens to be one of the most exhilarating transitions between town and country. Terry and Mary Enright, activists much loved in Belfast, look up from their Dermott Hill front door to a place more than a thousand feet high, and they can be up there in minutes.</p>
<p>John Gray is the distinguished guardian of Belfast's Linen Hall Library - itself an ingenious tribute to the creativity that can come from conflict - and lives in north Belfast. Minutes from his front door he, too, can rise a thousand feet above the city. "The nearest equivalent is Arthur's Seat [in Edinburgh] - and that's small," Gray says. "It doesn't have a 300-foot promontory, it doesn't have a prehistoric fort . . ." His list goes on. "It's an extraordinary place, and it is one of the principal ways I stay sane. I go up in blizzards, I go up at moonlight, I go up on a clear day when you can see as far as the Scottish Highlands, or the English Lake District. It is unlike anywhere else in Britain - a mountain projecting straight into an urban environment. It is a unique transition." Gray recalls that in another era, the mountain used to infuse the childhood narratives of Belfast's citizens. "It was a place of escape and adventure."</p>
<p>That was before the Troubles. The Belfast Hills - Divis, White Mountain, Cave Hill and the Black Mountain - became not so much a war zone, as a zone emptied of the people down below. That leaflet given by Terry Enright to the soldier explained that there was a great movement to rescue the Black Mountain, both from the military and from quarry and construction companies.</p>
<p>Gray reckons Enright is the man of the mountain, "an inspiring person who emerged from a society that during 30 years of conflict had to find its own ways of doing things - some of those ways weren't for the best, some were". Republican west Belfast generates community activists who improvise ways of doing business. "He's an exemplar," says Gray. "He's an urban man, but he loves the mountain."</p>
<p>In a political context "dominated by the orange and the green", a context still "substantially dysfunctional", according to Gray, Enright is also known as an artful coalition-builder who brings working-class class to environmentalism. Since 1990, when he became outraged by the quarrying that was gorging on the mountain and then stuffing the holes with waste, Enright has enlisted people from both posh civic-heritage campaigns and hard Catholic and Protestant estates to "walk the walk".</p>
<p>"We took people up the mountain to motivate them," he says. If they could discover the evidence of ancient habitation, its cairns, springs and flowers, they would want to love it and save it. The idea worked. Every August, during the West Belfast Festival, a coalition of community and conservation groups organises hundreds of people to walk the walk. At the edge of Enright's estate there is a mural painted by local children proclaiming: "Stop the destruction of the Black Mountain . . . for the land has been here longer than the likes of you."</p>
<p>Then, following the Good Friday Agreement, the MoD's "private property" was bought by the National Trust. Together with Belfast Hills Partnership, the trust will act as steward to the mountain. Already, environmentally friendly paths have been laid across the cap of the Black Mountain, before it finally opens to the public this summer; and "difficult" children being educated out of school have removed 1,500 discarded vehicle tyres from it.</p>
<p>But nothing has yet stopped the quarrying of the 80-million-year-old hard basalt lava out of which the mountain is formed, or the dumping of waste into the canyons this leaves behind. And over on White Mountain, a revolt is brewing in Castlerobin, a hamlet squeezed between the sites of two "superdumps" used by quarry companies to bury most of Northern Ireland's waste. Apart from the hazard to the mountain and its people, this practice now requires the evacuation of a colony of newts that have made the quarry their home.</p>
<p>"Angela Smith was the English minister sent in because our government is not up and running," says Margaret McCroskery, a Castlerobin resident. As environment minister for Northern Ireland, Smith gave planning permission for the dumps. But, says McCroskery, "People here are kicking up: our right to express an opinion in an inquiry has been violated; our community has no right of appeal."</p>
<p>The case signifies new expectations of politics created by the peace process, and a sense that in new times the Belfast Hills must move on to the political radar. They may have been there for 55 million years, but they are neither above nor beyond trouble.</p>
<p>Terry Enright looks from the road down to Belfast, back over the Black Mountain. There's a sprig of stones on the horizon, a cairn created by dispossessed kids in Belfast in memory of his son, Terry Og (young Terry), a gifted Gaelic footballer and a cross-community youth worker. He was shot during the spree of loyalist killings that preceded the Good Friday Agreement.</p>
<p>Terry Og's young widow, Deirdre, and her uncle, Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president, were among the pall-bearers that ugly, bleak day in January when 10,000 people - including a posse of Shankill teenagers - joined the dead man's cortege. Suddenly, the rain stopped and the sun shone. There was a noisy hush: a rainbow leaned across the city to the Black Mountain.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 20 Jun 2005 12:00:00 +0000Beatrix Campbell150892 at http://www.newstatesman.com